His bookshop, Imported Books, has been a mainstay at 2025 W. Clarendon Drive since the 1970s. Housed in the front of his white bungalow, a bright green door marks the entrance into the shop.

Inside, floor-to-ceiling dusty shelves are stacked with books of various languages, spilling over to a table labeled for novels, humor and mysteries. Signs reading “tenemos libros en Español,” meaning, “We have books in Spanish,” are tacked on multiple walls.

But now, after more than three decades of business, Jones, 91, says it’s time to close the shop.

A small 50-percent-off sale sign staked into the front yard about six months ago foreshadowed the shop’s closing.

“All bookstores are in trouble. People don’t buy books anymore. People buy clothes, beer, gasoline and cars,” said Jones, an Army corporal during World War II who served in France and Germany. “You can’t believe how slow it’s been.”

He pulled out one of several faded blue record books in the back office and flipped to last November.

“We sold $28 worth of books,” he said, flipping the pages forward. “In July 2013, we sold $28 worth of books again. That’s no business at all.”

In 1993, sales peaked their highest with gross sales of about $124,000. Business slowed about seven years ago when Jones’ age forced him to stop traveling across the state to book shows.

For several years, his friend and neighbor Cecille Fondren has helped him run the store off and on. In exchange, Jones gives her Spanish lessons during their weekly walks.

“It will be missed,” Fondren said. “We’ll see people all the time when we’re walking who recognize him from the shop.”

Jones said there’s no official closing date. He’s just waiting to sell a chunk of inventory before he closes his door and removes the shop’s sign out front the bookstore’s only marker in the neighborhood.

Known to many as “Uncle Robert,” Jones opened the store after some success selling Spanish children’s books and song books and Spanish-language dictionaries for $2.50 out of his car. He’d travel to schools and drug stores soliciting the books and come back the following week with a replenished supply.

“After about a year of that, I decided I could get by selling a few books,” Jones said.

Before that, he worked for his father for 23 years at the family business, J&S Carburetor on Beckley Avenue, until his dad died in 1974.

In the beginning, the shop was stocked with mostly Spanish books and dictionaries.

“When we moved in, there weren’t any shelves. With my own hands and some power tools, I put up these shelves. We moved in here with our bed, two or three pieces of furniture, some pots and pans and very few clothes,” Jones said.

His affinity for languages began in high school, where he took his first Spanish class. Watching movies in Spanish followed. He also regularly traveled to a barber shop on McKinney Avenue to play checkers and chess with a Hispanic man. And he ate lunch at a Spanish-speaking table at a men’s club.

“Of course, nowadays, we have hundreds and thousands of Spanish speakers. But you only had a few thousand people who spoke Spanish and read Spanish in Dallas at that time,” Jones said. “But if you looked for it, you could find some people to speak Spanish with.”

While studying petroleum engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, he took another Spanish course, befriended Spanish-speaking college students and lived in a bilingual co-op. He also completed courses in French, German and Russian and read books on Italian and Portuguese.

“I became fluent in Spanish, hobnobbing with the college kids from the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio,” Jones said.

He pointed to the blue typewriter that sits on a desk in his back office, where he typed the shop’s monthly newsletter. Much of the shop’s records are still organized by hand. His sales are rung up on a basic cash register and logged in a handwritten stack of record books.

For more than 10 years, Irma Degollado, 55, worked at the shop with Jones. She read all the Spanish literature and could locate almost every book.

She learned French, German, Portuguese and even sign language during her tenure at the store, though she’s since forgotten most of it, she said.

Besides Fondren’s occasional help, Jones has been running the shop on his own for the last five years.

“Everybody now has computers and Amazon.com,” said Degollado, shrugging her shoulders, of the store’s closing.

She recalled that most of the store’s business in the 1990s was done through mail orders. Customers would come in on Saturdays, but there was never much foot traffic.

“Even with 50 percent off, hardly anyone is here,” she said, looking around the shop on a recent Friday afternoon. “It’s sad. This is a historical marker practically. It’s been here forever.”

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